Hands-on test of the XL H1 (in French)

[Monglane]

Sorry that it's in French but at least you'll see some detailed pictures of the camera...

The thread is here : http://www.cameravideo.net/forum/showthread.php?t=722.

I'll try and translate the most significant points for you momentarily.

[Monglane]

OK, so here are the main things noted by the reviewer :

The quality of the viewfinder is poor, both in terms of resolution (to the point that focus is made difficult) and in terms of being cluttered by poorly placed technical data.

The so-called "LCD screen" is still so very small that it becomes barely usable to frame a shot (same as previous Canon models).

There is a noticeable delay between the hand's action on the focus ring and the actual focus change.

The camera is still not well balanced (a lot of weight on the hand(s) and very little on the shoulder).

There are tons of footage as well in the post underneath the first one... and the entire test is much longer than I thought at first, which means I don't have time to analyse, synthesize and translate right now. Will try to get back to it later if at all possible. :huh:

[Barry_Green]

I spent some time with the XL H1 at RESFest. It's a noticeably better camera than the XL2, from some aspects. Other aspects aren't so much better.

Things I liked: they fixed my major complaints about the XL2's lack of feedback. Now when you go in the menus and adjust scene file settings, you get actual numeric feedback of what your settings are (instead of a bogus graph). Furthermore, even that level of feedback is made less necessary by the simple fact that you can save scene files on an SD card.

I also liked that they added a Z00-Z99 distance scale to the lens, and they added distance readouts in the viewfinder (in either feet or meters).

I also really liked the look of the camera. Say what you will about the XL1 and XL2, but that red & white paint job just screams "ricer". But the XL H1 was gorgeous, a sleek and slick black beauty. It's not the same exact shape as typical broadcast cameras, but so what -- it's purty! It looks a lot more professional than the XL1/XL2 do.

Granted, the viewfinder is awful, but then again so was the XL2's. It's not easy to judge focus and it's very "bitty". They do have a peaking feature, which helps some. Not as effective as JVC's colored "focus assist" though. They do also have the 2x magnify feature like the Sony Z1, that also helps. I didn't notice if it stays active during recording or not, but it does print a little yellow "focus" word on the display so you won't forget that you're in the magnify mode.

There's extensive menu control, and I mean extensive. You can really paint this camera's image! However, it's not easy to navigate at all. The JVC menus are laid out like a regular pro camera, which means you will have several pages of settings to scroll through, but they're well described so you know what you're looking at. In the Canon they crammed tons and tons of image settings all on one page! So everything had little three- or four-character abbreviated names, and then there was a picon-style one-line display at the bottom that pops up and -- well, heck... it was quite confusing. It didn't act like a pro camera in that regard, it rather acted and looked like my little PowerShot digital camera actually. Not sure I liked that at all. Maybe if you get used to it you could learn to navigate through that menu quicker than you can in a broadcast-style camera's menus, but then again, if you learned to type on a Dvorak keyboard you could probably get pretty quick at that too. Wouldn't do you a bit of good in the real world though... so the jury's out on the menu system.

The main thing I did not care for at all is the feel of the focus and zoom. It's awful. It's been described by the beloved Graeme Nattress as the "wet cabbage" effect -- like the focus ring is connected to the focus motor through a layer of wet cabbage. Good luck to you people who choose to use that lens, I couldn't stand it. Could not STAND it. Ugh. Yuck. In all honesty I can't stand any delay-based servo lens system, I don't care for the Sony Z1's servo rings, but the Sony's are light years better than the XL H1 that I used. Leaps and bounds better. I will give Canon the benefit of the doubt and say that this was probably a pre-production model and that maybe (hopefully!) the production model will be better.

Overall I have to say I liked it a lot better than the XL2. It seems like they were listening and they implemented some important fixes (such as feedback to the user). Can't abide that lens though, so when they make a non-servo lens I'll take a closer look at it.

[Antoine_Fabi]

Barry ,

What is your opinion about image quality ?

[evinsky]

I thought the image quality was very good. Definately the best of any HDV camer yet made. However I felt the image although very sharp and detailed, had a very processed look. A certain softness that was a little strange. The motion rendering in 24F was great! No real difference from the XL2 or DVX. But the Lattitude was not great. It was on par with the DVX maybe even a bit less. Highlights rolled off smoothly but way too soon. In a flat light environment (Courtyard of the Egyptian at 6PM) I could not hold this dude's white shirt and get a good exposure for his face.
I either had to let the shirt go or have an under exposed face. This demo camera was very near a production camera and I did set it to cinegamma, but it was not dialed in. So maybe it can do better with some tweaking. If I had to shoot HDV this would definately be my camera of choice, but compared to the 3D look of the HVX it's not a contest.

[Antoine_Fabi]

evinski,

I saw some clips at DVINFO, and i tought that it had big problems handling the highlights...

[Barry_Green]

What is your opinion about image quality ?
No opinion yet. They didn't have a monitor hooked up to it while I was there, so the only things we saw were in the viewfinder, and that's no way to judge anything.

[evinsky]

BTW the footage I saw was on a renter 21" Sony HD production monitor. We tried to calibrate it with the SMTPE color bars from the camera but I still think the monitor was a little off. However I'm sure what I saw was a camera and not a monitor issue.

[stephenvv]

BTW the footage I saw was on a renter 21" Sony HD production monitor. We tried to calibrate it with the SMTPE color bars from the camera but I still think the monitor was a little off. However I'm sure what I saw was a camera and not a monitor issue.

The French site footage and all the clips at DVInfo also show lots of highlight issues, but like the early HD100 clips, it's hard to tell if it's the camera, camera settings and/or shooter.

However, like the HD100, HDV codec seems to hold together better than Sony or earlier JVCs shooting at 60i.

More clips with nice A/B comparisons and detailed settings will tell us more though.